Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #107295

Pape Gaye, IntraHealth International, Inc., 6340 Quadrangle Drive, Suite 200, Chapel Hill, NC 27517, 919-313-9100, dnelson@intrahealth.org and Lauren Crigler, IntraHealth International, 6340 Quadrangle Dr., Suite 200, Chapel Hill, NC 27517.

The Performance Improvement (PI) approach is considered a "best practice" for enabling health care managers and organizations to identify and address performance gaps in service delivery. During the PRIME II Project, IntraHealth and partner Training Resources Group, Inc. (TRG) modeled and successfully utilized PI to strengthen primary providers' ability to improve family planning and reproductive health care in low-resource settings. The project's results in PI energized efforts to share the methodology with health care organizations globally, and the approach has been adapted as the basis for the action-planning process used by the Implementing Best Practices (IBP) Initiative during its regional meetings.

PRIME II applied PI at the facility level--improving performance observation scores for a range of providers from physicians, nurses and midwives to pharmacy agents--and used the approach to build the capacity of training organizations and centers.

Informed by results and lessons learned from these interventions, the IBP's application of PI further demonstrates the flexibility and adaptability of this highly participatory, step-by-step approach as a tool that policy makers, providers and NGO managers can use together in a meeting setting to plan reproductive health interventions appropriate to their country contexts. Guided by PI, country teams identify actions they will take, once back in their countries, to apply what they have learned at the IBP meeting. A country team composed of 10 to 25 members takes approximately four hours to use PI to identify measurable tasks that will enhance reproductive health services in the resource-constrained settings where they work.

Learning Objectives:

• • Articulate the basic steps of the Performance Improvement (PI) approach
• • Describe results from the application of PI in health care facilities and training organizations
• • Discuss the use of PI as a tool for facilitating action-planning to implement best practices

Keywords: Reproductive Health, Planning

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation